The Little Paris Quarter [Kyuchuk Parizh]

Throughout the years quite a few of the small neighbourhoods were redeveloped and fused together. Gradually, the Little Paris Quarter [Kyuchuk Parizh] grew bigger and the associations with it were transformed. From a refugee quarter it turned into one of the biggest residential areas in town, bringing together people from different backgrounds and with different personal histories. Its borders were changed and a lot of residents refer to it as a thing of the past.

“Now they call Kyuchuk Parizh everything up to Markovo and Proslav but this is not the case. Kyuchuk Parizh used to be from the railways to the Bacho Kiro Street, up to the road to Kuklen, then the hospital (Second City Hospital), it was out of town, and then a bit after the supermarket. This is a fifth of the Southern District of today…

Now people come from various places but back then Kyuchuk Parizh accommodated migrants from Macedonia and Thrace. Half of them were from Macedonia, they had come at about the same time from the same region, Enidzhe Vardar (a town in Aegean Macedonia) and quite a few of them were kin… My neighbours have a grandfather from Macedonia and a grandmother from Thrace and they no longer speak their dialect. When we sat down with the last old lady to chat, we spoke Macedonian dialect. She learned it from the relatives she came with and so did I. When we were little there were old women (no old men as they were killed in the wars) who took their wood stools out into the street and chatted in Macedonian dialect; other than that, everyone had conversational language. This is how I learned it, from the old women; no one spoke it at home…

I.G., recorded by Ekaterina Merlanova, 2019.